How Do You Measure Application Performance?

Web performance isn’t just about how long a website needs to render all its page elements—it also covers techniques for monitoring an application’s runtime, user-defined transactions, component response times, and network requests. The important thing is using performance data to evaluate the success of your app or service, whether you’re trying to compare different versions or introduce new capabilities.

Application performance monitoring (APM) is a series of metrics for maintaining excellence in web performance and adopting the best development practices to produce a quality user experience. Generally speaking, it involves observing app behavior, managing IT resources, and sending bug reports. APM works by tracking a wide variety of real-time data points on your app dependencies and supporting infrastructure to repair problems before they can impact your bottom line.

Four Examples of Metrics that Dive into App Availability

Performance can be summarized using operational, functional, and usable methods aimed at fulfilling your business requirements. A good place to start is by conducting basic checks on SSL, DNS, and WHOIS domains. To get a more accurate overview, you should monitor points of failure in aggregate layers instead of creating charts for separate systems.

1. Frequency of errors caused by unexpected app failure or demanding requests like fetching a database query
2. Number of cloud-based instances running in a given timeframe that auto-scales to keep up with user activity
3. The average response rate for gauging the level of customer interest in your brand
4. Request rates to measure the volume of traffic received by your app to estimate how many users are online

The good news is that the metrics for displaying the usage of underlying resources are already present in your company’s databases and web servers. However, you’ll still need to convert that data into valuable insights to gain a better understanding of historical performance trends.

What Are Some Checks to Incorporate into Your Dashboard Overview?

As a rule of thumb, your status page should show all the available checks and contain reports that are easy to navigate. To illustrate, you can set up a Real User Monitoring (RUM) page to actively collect data based on user traffic, page load speed, error breakdown, and bounce rate. From there, the dashboard will reveal these analytics for any URL or time interval you specify.

Aside from catching HTTP errors or reporting on incidents, you should take advantage of a critical feature known as Real-Time Analysis from the Uptime.com dashboard. At the press of a button, it presents a timeline of your outage history under the Latest Alerts. To monitor those checks, it’s recommended that you conduct a root-cause analysis using an API to see in detail which steps timed out the server.

For SLA compliance, the user can set a baseline SLA value that is converted into a color-coded report with multiple metrics graphed on the same chart. Depending on how far they are from meeting the SLA, the color will change to reflect that, with red being the most severe and green suggesting an acceptable state.

Another type of functionality is private location monitoring. It enables you to test apps and services via an internal network so you can optimize them for performance before they are ready to release. If you own other remote servers, then you’ll need location monitoring to pinpoint the exact location of an outage.

Once you implement these approaches, you will see continuous improvement in every measurable outcome.

What Makes Uptime.com Stand Out as a Server Monitoring Provider

At Uptime.com, users can run a waterfall analysis on a page speed test, filled with data points that tell them which assets took the longest to load. Additionally, we offer advanced RUM, which incorporates Apdex to summarize user satisfaction with your apps. This means you get access to the best performance monitoring tools on the market, from your hosted domains to third-party integrations.

Your account comes with a wide range of available checks across many locations to help trace the source of downtime from any country. Through critical KPIs, Uptime.com will indicate the amount of progress you’ve made toward meeting your SLA targets. Another benefit is only paying for the features you plan on using to customize your performance monitoring settings.

As long as you’re proactive about minimizing redirects and requests, your site will have shorter load times. If you ever need a complete drill-down of various check types (API, HTTP, SLA, etc.), Uptime.com has you covered with detailed charts and immediate notifications to your app. To get ahead of the competition, focus on balancing the load and distributing content efficiently.